The first step in solving the problem with illegal immigration is to stop giving incentives for illegals to stay in our country. But, some people want to go as far as provided subsidized college education to illegal immigrants. If we do this, it will provide another huge incentive to break into our country. I found a petition which is trying to stop this atrocity, and, as we get more signatures, donations are made to help the border patrol in their tasks.
http://petitionearth.com/viewpetition.php?id=63
Please, sign this and keep staying active in this important battle!

Dear Judge Posner: I am usually an admirer of your proposed solutions to our public policy problems. But in the case of illegal immigration, I find myself wondering why you refuse to allow market forces to operate. While it is true that the DHS cannot deport the 12 million illegals, we need not accept their long-term presence. As with antitrust, Congress has enacted a private right of action against employers of illegals (under RICO). I have brought several class actions on behalf of citizens against employers for wage depression. Why do you not welcome such cases as you have in certain areas of legitimate per se antitrust violations?
Secondly, the government can, as you state, seriously enforce immigration law by issuing biometric tamperproof cards to all persons eligible for employment in the US and require employers to use the free matching system when hiring. I fail to see why this will not result in the voluntary departure of millions of illegals. Employmet is the magnet that brings them here. Why would they stay without it?

Third, the government can get serious about workplace enforcement, and prosecute more employers who knowingly hire illegals.

When the combination of these factors is in effect, enforcement by attrition will solve the problem and end the attraction of illegal migration to the U.S.

Sincerely,
Howard Foster
Chicago
(truly, an admirer of yours, end your son Eric)

"Self-Deportation" through enforcement of current US Law. It works where it's tried!!!

Since many would argue that the set of illegal aliens in this country are also another set of foreigners to whom the statement "They are not Americans; we do not owe them anything" applies, I fail to see how Judge Posner can logically argue that we should feel differently about those who actively queue-jumped (not to mention did not satisfy any sort of education requirements like many others) when compared to those who patiently waited in line to come here...

Anyway, I do not see understanding from Posner of why previous attempts at exactly what he proposes failed. The Simpson-Mazzoli bill in 1986 attempted something very similar and did not work because of the vested interests against any real enforcement system. Given that reality, why would the American public accept a fantasy tradeoff like the one proposed? Unrestricted immigration of large numbers of desperate people is unlike any immigration system in the industrialized world and given the evidence of its depressing wages at the bottom of society, I think the burden of proof is on the immigration advocates to show why we need more...

Are you guys serious? I opposed Simpson-Mazzolli in 1986 concluding it would just set us up for another amnesty. What do you mean we can't deport 12 million people? Of course we can. It might take five years, so what? Their cost to the economy is tremendous. Do a little DCF analysis, I'm sure the IRR will run over 60%! Looks good to me.
I lived in Los Angeles, Alta California, from 1985 to 2004. It's no longer part of the US. Study a little history and develop a little humility. You are setting this country up for a civil war. It's that bad. We have an irredentist movement, La Raza. Maybe you're unaware of it? Or you anticipate Larry Summers' problem and lack the guts to say the obvious: we are importing problems. What do you think the effect is of importing a group of poor illiterates with an average IQ of about 82? Or maybe you don't think there is any? Look at California's $14 billion budget deficit. Look at hospitals closing. Look at schools with 110 languages spoken by the students. Look at Bush's crazy NCLB law. Wow!
While I agree with 90+% of what you say and have read 12 of your books, and many of your published cases, I disagree vehemently with you here. The Mexican War is being refought every day down here in the Southwest. The Mexican government makes no bones about its claims to the Southwest. Dismiss them as rhetoric if you wish. I don't. If it makes you feel better, call me racist. See if I care. I don't.
I think part of your problem arises from not accepting the nature of law. I refer you to an article you once described as the finest law review article ever written, 10 Harvard Law Review 457, Holmes, "The Path of the Law", (1897). Our illegal immigrants are NOT properly understood as law breakers but advance men for an invading army. You have been "in the law" too long. These are not Holmesian "bad men", but invaders and should be so dealt with. I believe it was Washington who said, "millions for defense and not a cent for tribute". Why are we paying illegal aliens tribute? Crazy. This is not a legal issue in my judgment, but a military one. It's like the war on terror. Bring Osama to justice? Why? It's war. Mao Zedong said, "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun". Without the use of guns, there is no law. What do police carry? What do federal marshals carry? You are too squeamish.
MBA (Chicago) '74.

The issue of illegal immigration is a cosequence, not a cause. The cause is the
inability of the Mexcan government to
create a stable middle class that would choose to stay rather than flee to the North. Instead, Mexico profits--literally and figuratively--by having millions of its citizens in the United States. This occurs in essentially two ways: by remittances of billions of dollars from illegal workers in the North which are sent back home; and by "exporting" an entire group of individuals who, if they stayed, might foment enough political and economic instability so as to challenge the status quo.

I believe that Judge Posner is mistaken. I do not believe most illegal immigrants pay payroll taxes. This gives them an unfair cost advantage over citizens. I would not worry if immigrants had to pay all the taxes citizens do. With the current tax system there is no way to make that happen.

I suggest that the size of the underground labor market is directly related to the high costs of payroll taxes: withholding, employer matching, and, increasingly, compliance. Zoe Baird had her nomination for attorney general derailed because she did not pay payroll taxes for her domestic help. It was cheaper and easier to wait to be caught, and then pay back taxes, interest, and penalties. She didn't anticipate the political problems.

I suggest that California has a bigger problem with illegal immigration than Texas because California taxes income and Texas does not. An illegal immigrant in Texas has to pay state sales taxes. He still has an advantage in not paying federal payroll taxes.

I see no point in legalizing current illegals by whatever method when the incentives to come here to work in the underground labor market still exist. I think that likely efforts to eliminate that market, such as the proposed Employment Verification Database would be worse than useless.

"Third, it is argued that an amnesty would be unfair to those foreigners patiently waiting in line for permission to immigrate legally to the United States." ...............

I believe that this would only encourage illegal immigration at the expense of legal immigration. Where I live the state troopers have an amnesty on the speed limit. No citations are issued within 5 mph of the speed limit. Though the speed limit is 60, a person can in reality drive up to 65 without a ticket. So what do people do? They drive 65 mph, break the law, but enjoy an amnesty. Let's not reward illegal immigration. Illegal immigration is bad; legal immigration is good.

"it is argued that an amnesty would be unfair to those foreigners patiently waiting in line for permission to immigrate legally to the United States."

Solution: speed up the line.

“They are not Americans; we do not owe them anything. If an amnesty solves our problems, the fact that it is in some global sense "unfair" to another set of foreigners deserves, in my opinion, no consideration.”

What was it? “Bring us your poor, your tired, your huddled [...]” Or maybe somehting about a Rawlsian judge. Can't remember.

Talking about that: could we have the Statue of Liberty back? Thank you?

Nice post, but the last point ("They are not Americans; we do not owe them anything.") might be oversimplifying things. For legal American immigrants who are waiting for family members to be allowed in, amnesty for illegals might delegitimize the whole process. It could lead to diminished faith in the government in general, or may encourage more elaborate illegal entry strategies.

The judge has lost his judgement !!!!
Arent you supposed to be the fair, the righteous judges of people's actions?.
The last point ("They are not Americans; we do not owe them anything.") ... was amazingly callous

"They are not Americans; we do not owe them anything".

I am sorry to hear that you are a judge. Become an legal immigrant for a minute and say that.

Third, it is argued that an amnesty would be unfair to those foreigners patiently waiting in line for permission to immigrate legally to the United States. But why the United States should care about these people is obscure. They are not Americans; we do not owe them anything. If an amnesty solves our problems, the fact that it is in some global sense "unfair" to another set of foreigners deserves, in my opinion, no consideration.

What? Don't forget that the potential legal immigrants also include employment-based immigrants who have been here legally on work visa since late 1990s and paying taxes. These hard-working legally here folks are as American as ever.

You are a self-righteous pig to say "America does not owe them anything!"

"But why the United States should care about these people is obscure. They are not Americans; we do not owe them anything. If an amnesty solves our problems, the fact that it is in some global sense "unfair" to another set of foreigners deserves, in my opinion, no consideration."

The same callous statement that "They are not Americans;...." may be applied to the illegal alien as well. We owe these people nothing except an invitation to repatriate themselves and a lesson in the meaning of words sovereign borders.

The risk of promoting futher illegal immigration by granting another amnesty is too high. One definition of insanity is to repeat the same failed policies over and over again with expectations of success. The amnesties of the past have proven to be failures, so why should we expect success with another? You guys are right, this is another case of a once good judge becoming a victim of Alzheimers.

It seems Judge Posner has the same ignorance as most other citizens - that foreigners waiting "in the line" for legal permanent residency are all outside the country.

The fact is that more than a million foreigners are legally in the country on temporary H-1 and H-4 visas have been waiting "in the line" for permanent residency for upto 10 years.

It will be total travesty of justice if those who who entered the country after getting a visa from the US Consulate have to keep waiting, while those who jumped the border in the middle of the night get permanent residency.

"Third, it is argued that an amnesty would be unfair to those foreigners patiently waiting in line for permission to immigrate legally to the United States. But why the United States should care about these people is obscure. They are not Americans; we do not owe them anything. If an amnesty solves our problems, the fact that it is in some global sense "unfair" to another set of foreigners deserves, in my opinion, no consideration."
I agree with Posner, but honestly, i'm unconvinced by the whole concept of fairness trumping overall good, even if those people were American citizens, being "fair" to them seems less of a concern to me than legislating for the greater overall socioeconomic good. Prisoner rehabilitation programs often run into this issue, taxpayer dollars going to rehabilitate prisoners is in some sense unfair, as law abiding citizens have to foot their own bill, but the overall economic benefits from turning a sizable percentage of criminals into taxpayers seems to me to trump issues of fairness. Similarly, if "unfairness" is weighed against the cost of hunting down and deporting 12 million working men and women in America, then the cost of being unfair would have to be REALLY high, and i don't see as it is.

Actually, at the risk of being badly off topic, what do you think of the idea of evading the issues with fairness that criminal rehabilitation programs run into, by having a privatized prison system that accepts an upfront payment from the state for the estimated lifetime costs of incarceration(calculated in sort of the same way insurance is calculated now, and allowing for some profit to the investors.) Then the company could engage in rehabilitation programs(possibly incentivized by a cut of future tax earnings from that individual) that would take the innate unfairness out of the government's hands, while allowing the prison running company adept at rehabilitating prisoners into as functioning as possible taxpayers to reap windfall profits.
i hope that was coherent enough, it seems a high stakes win/win to me.

"But why the United States should care about these people is obscure. They are not Americans; we do not owe them anything. If an amnesty solves our problems, the fact that it is in some global sense "unfair" to another set of foreigners deserves, in my opinion, no consideration."

Wow! You are insane!

If you truly believe what you wrote, refund all the taxes that the legals have been paying into the system for years.

Reward illegal behavior and punish law abiding residents. Is that your answer? I can see the direction that the country is headed in, if lawmakers continue to follow your brand of "logic".

The above post understates the fairness problems of amnestying illegal aliens when it writes,

"it is argued that an amnesty would be unfair to those foreigners patiently waiting in line for permission to immigrate legally to the United States. But why the United States should care about these people is obscure. They are not Americans; we do not owe them anything."

But some of those foreigners "patiently waiting in line" are closely tied to Americans, and their fortunes are inextricably intertwined with Americans.

My wife, for one. She worked in the U.S. as a legal alien for an embassy that paid her $14,000 per year, since she didn't have a green card that would allow her to work legally for any other kind of employer (you don't need a green card to work for an embassy).

She could have made far more money as an illegal alien doing translations or other work in the cash economy illegally. (The average illegal alien household in Metropolitan Washington, D.C. makes over $60,000 per year).

But instead, she patiently waited in line, at a great financial cost.

Only after she married me (and then waited months for the immigration authorities to approve her marriage-based green card application) did she finally become a legal resident, and that took a couple years after the marriage (affecting our marital standard of living).

Why should illegal aliens who worked illegally in better-paying jobs get legalized as speedily as my wife, who sacrificed financially to do things the legal way?

Amnesty is sometimes a necessary evil.

But the Ted Kennedy-George Bush amnesty proposal (known as "comprehensive immigration reform"), which charged only $2,000 for a renewable Z-visa which would allow illegal aliens to stay in the country indefinitely (when the economic value of a permanent residency is at least $100,000) was a foolish giveaway, not just an amnesty.

A hardheaded realist would not approve of the amnesty contained in that "comprehensive immigration reform" proposal, which sold the right to remain in the U.S. far too cheaply (more cheaply than it is obtained legally by many legal immigrants -- the administrative fee for getting a green card is over $1,000, and other fees as well must be paid prior to that to get it).

George W. A very large chunk of CA's DEBT came from very bright MBA's of the 70's cohort craftily giving CA a pretty vigorous screwing on energy. I'd say educating the kids of those doing the work out there pales by comparison.

BTW with an MBA and all, has it occured to you that immigrants enter our work force w/o American taxpayers having invested $120,000 in their K-12 education and that our "own" workers would have kids going to school while they worked?

Lastly, IF you actually want to stem the tide, the choke point IS that of penalizing the employer. Are you ready to do what that entails? Newt thought Repubs were serious about limiting illegals but was cut off at the knees on that issue.

Hans......... Thanks, your real world observations show what a complex problem immigration policy is today. It seems that between fairness to those standing in line, and to other interests such as the traditional American labor force, and a practical and workable solution that their are FEW common denominators.

The current mess gives benefits to some and gores the oxen of others and any "reform" will do much the same. Tough politics!

I've written about a practical and taxpayer-friendly solution to the illegal immigration issue on this blog before, but I'll repeat myself since it's still an issue. I think my proposal is by far the most cost efficient of any one that I've heard so far, and since the federal deficit is 410 billion dollars, I'm gonna say that us taxpayers probably care about this more than any politicking that has beset the immigration issue. Before I start, a few fairly obvious observations:

1. Full disclosure: I am a legal immigrant.

2. Enforcement against employers [checking if they employ illegals] is expensive to the taxpayer, because paying people to check on companies costs money, while employers have huge incentives to hire illegal workers and illegals have huge incentives to immigrate and work for such employers. Basically, the government/taxpayer is fighting against both of those groups.

3. Increased border protection is expensive to the taxpayer. While protecting the border is important for security reasons, half of illegal immigrants simply overstay their tourist visas, which are [and should be] ridiculously easy to obtain. Closing the border would just mean that more people would get and overstay their visas. Closing the border is also ridiculously expensive.

4. An amnesty would encourage further illegal immigration unless coupled with other structural changes. Obviously, letting people break a law and then letting them get away with it is bad policy in the long run. Either the law should be changed, or an amnesty coupled with other changes that discourage the behavior in question.

5. "Biometric" or tamper-proof ID for all aliens don't work. Even if one could create tamper-proof cards, what would stop an illegal immigrant from forging a citizen's documents, which are obviously not tamper-proof [think your license]?

We also know that some people want all illegals deported on moral ['they broke the law'] or cultural ['I don't want to press 1 for English'] grounds. While I don't think the latter is a serious issue, the former should be taken into account. However, it has to be balanced against the inconvenience and cost of deporting 12 million people, and the immediate shock to a few local economies. In my proposal, I think the factors weigh against mass-deportation. That said, Congress should pass a law with the following provisions:

1. Any illegal immigrant in the United States may report before December 31, 2009 [or whatever date] to US authorities. All such persons will be registered, and those found not to have committed any criminal acts will be granted legal immigrant status, subject to an obligation to pay a fine in the amount of $X,000 [a good econ grad student can get a good number here]. All such persons will be eligible for US citizenship, subject to [the same rules as legal immigrants or more severe rules involving longer time of residence – it doesn't really matter to me]. All persons found to have committed a criminal act prior to reporting will be deported.

2. Any illegal immigrant after December 31, 2009 [or whatever date we chose] who can prove that he is employed by a US employer will be entitled to a payment of $X,000 [a high enough number to encourage self-reporting and hurt the employer] from such an employer, and any such person will be granted legal status and eligible for citizenship on the same terms as those under No. 1.

That's it. I realize this is a form of amnesty, despite the fine that is involved. But the adoption of part 2 prevents the amnesty from incentivizing further illegal immigration. While at first glance it would seem to encourage people to come here and work, the fact is that they could no longer find work. No employer would hire an illegal immigrant after the date because it would create such a huge liability for them, and unlike today, the workers would not be complicit in staying hidden – the illegal workers would out themselves! With the incentive to immigrate gone, enforcement costs to the taxpayer go down to practically zero.

Note: While this leaves the burden of determining legality to the employers, we already have that scenario – that's why we punish employers for hiring illegals even if they could not have known better.

I've just been asked this question about my post above, so I'll clarify:
Because employers, starting with the date above, will be on the hook for tens of thousands of dollars per illegal employee, they will fire all illegal employees by the reporting date. As a result, every illegal immigrant has an incentive to report and pay the fine rather than be fired, not report, and find themselves not having reported and unemployable. The incentives are in place to drive every illegal immigrant into the daylight, and for future immigration to be deterred because employers, fearing the payment they have to make, will refuse to employ illegal labor.

Let's close down the "fuzzy headed" thinking that produces that warm fuzzy feeling that we all so like. The issue is we either control the problem or throw the borders open to every one. There is no other solution. Just remember, a Nation that cannot maintain it's sovereignty has no right to exist as a Nation. This "sovereignty" applies to its laws, it's citizens, its guests, as well as it's borders.

As for Rome, it became soft and weak (much prefering the warm fuzzy feeling) that corrupted it both spiritually and intellectually. As such, it no longer could maintain it's "sovereignty" or the sovereignty of it's borders and as they say, "The rest is history".

Haris, I really like that #2 for combining so many of the worst features of bounty hunting, entrapment and coercing reporting to the gestapo, along with creating a PILE of work for lawyers!

"Well your honor, I don't employ them, they're subcontractors" "Well, I checked out my landscaping contractor when I hired him and though I get the same bill it appears the company has been "sold" to others." And so on....... clogging up the courts until more illegals arrive to help build new courthouses.

As for justifying the whole thing because we've half trillion deficits, I think we know that the cause of them was a pricey expedition to protect us from something or another and not having the political will to raise taxes to pay for it. One doubts that levying fees on low paid migrants, casual labor and small independent entrepreneurs is likely to put a dent in our deficits.

I'd agree that "closing the border" is a costly fiction, and have seen figures of $10k per deportee for the "send em back" idea, which of course would be about as effective as holding back the tide by using a pail to throw the water back.

Jack
How different are the standards in #2 any different than what we have now? We already fine employers for using illegal labor. How do you determine whom to fine? Now instead of just paying a fine, you also pay a nice bounty to welcome a new legal immigrant. That should get your HR person to start looking at documentation on day one. If you think that's less humane than letting people live in the shadows, working for tiny wages and enduring crimes against themselves and their families because they fear deportation, then by all means, continue your gestapo comparisons.

A COUPLE OF BIG PROBLEMS WITH THIS ANALYSIS.

First, you are incorrect that illegal immigrants commit crimes at a rate less than natives. What is actually correct is that illegal immigrant Mexicans commit crimes at a lower rate than LEGAL and citizen *Mexicans*. The comparisons are intra ethnic group. Because today's immigration is disproptionately among ethnic groups that have a greater crime rate, it is quite misleading to insinuate, as you do, that the more illegal aliens a community has the less crime it will experience. That is false, obviously false. And think about what this means for a minute, Judge. Illegal Mexican immigrants come here with a crime rate greater than that of the average native, and each generation commits more crime. Why is that encouraging? We get more crime when they arrive. And even more crime when their children grow up. GREAT NEWS!

Judge Posner, I highly respect your work, and have read much of it (books rather than decisions). I'm suprised that you'd posit such a strawman--the "deport them all" canard. Nobody wants to "deport them all." Nobody. What serious enforcement proponents want to do about this problem is to enforce the law against employers and within the interior, thus turning the job magnet off. Part of this process is of course the deportation of a FRACTION of illegal aliens (which we do even today). A much larger number of illegal aliens, faced with difficulties securing employment and increased risk of deportation, will then choose to "self deport."

There are many feasible ways to deal with the problem of illegal immigration. Plase look into similar "attrition" strategies advocated by places like the Center for Immigration Studies.

I want to be clear. There are respectable arguments to be made in opposition to an "attrition" strategy. But the least of what should be done is to argue against actual proposals and not strawman "deport them all" talking points.

"We already fine employers for using illegal labor."

Not really. In 2004, employment site enforcement was at essentially non-existent levels. The token enforcement you now see on the news here and there is just that, token raids to make the public feel secure enough to support amnesty. But it has helped nevertheless. Imagine what a few billion dollars of enforcement could accomplish.

Activists are mislead and misguided. We don't need a fence or a wall. We need interior enforcement to remove, to virtually eliminate, the incentive for being here in the first place. No "harrassment" of illegals is necessary, enforce the law against the employers and the illegals will return home. That should be priority number one, but unfortunately the focus has been on the fence.

Sorry for a third post but after reading the comments I wanted to make sure that I was not confused with the earlier commenter, Hans Bader.

We don't need a fence or a wall. We need interior enforcement to remove, to virtually eliminate, the incentive for being here in the first place. No "harrassment" of illegals is necessary, enforce the law against the employers and the illegals will return home.

Hans, that's essentially what I'm trying to achieve, except at a lower cost to the taxpayer. Enforcement against employers is expensive: it takes manpower to make random checks, especially because both the employer and the employee have incentives to hide. That's why my suggestion attempts to incentivize illegal labor to identify themselves, while ending the incentives for employers to hire illegal workers. Basically, instead of working against the employers and illegal labor, we get them both to do the job for us, at a far far lower cost.

What we need are more sting operations, whereby day laborers and other illegal aliens are enticed into applying for employment and arrested when doing so. These people will be so fearful of approaching anyone for work that they'll give up and return home. This has recently been tried with much success already, but it should be expanded.

I too agree that the obvious choke point is not our huge borders and all other ports of entry but at the employer interface.

IF we believe, as is the case, it's against our laws to hire "illegals" then a punitive system is in order. Economists here will quickly note that the "price" of violating our immigration laws is too low relative to the expected gain to the employer.

If we were serious, and I don't for a minute think we are, we'd quickly stiffen the fines and penalties for both parties engaging in illegal behavior. At the "right price" just as with the IRS the fear of paying the price for cheating would sharply limit what is going on today.

As the illegal trade demonstrates our need for new labor as we limited the underground immigration, so should we increase legal immigration to a level WE decide is beneficial.

For now with housing in the tank and recession coming I'd guess the inflow will be much slower with some number of the jobless returning home. A good time to implement a rational policy!

When will people learn that a white-knuckle grip does not make us safer?

More enforcement means the lawbreakers become more violent and rapacious. More enforcement means law-abiding businesses go under or move out of the country.

And we really don't need to teach a generation of immigrants to become stool pigeons.

A couple of points to some recent comments:

I am very in favor of increasing both fines and the intensity of enforcement against employers. But to have a really good system, one where we could hold employers accountable, we would need to have a national ID of some kind with some kind of electronic verifiability. As it is now, illegal immigrants come to employers with forged documents, and even if the employer doesn't think they are legit, without being 100% sure they don't feel like the can do anything without being accused of discrimination. Or, if they do want to hire them, the uncertainty gives them an excuse ("I'm not a document expert"). The recent Swift Co. raids, for example, were also to catch identity thieves and document forgers.

As to Bob's comment, any individual who would resort to violence and crime instead of returning home and working for a living is not the sort of citizen we should want in the first place. But, I don't deny an element of truth in your scenario. Jobless holdouts could resort to criminal activity to finance their continued presence. I don't think it would be as common as you fear, however.

"As the illegal trade demonstrates our need for new labor as we limited the underground immigration, so should we increase legal immigration to a level WE decide is beneficial."

The big lie. It is an amazingly lie and farce to pretend we "need" millions of unskilled manual laborers, and an even bigger whopper to say with a straight face these industries are experiencing chronic labor shortages. If one tracks the wage growth in areas which typically employ illegal aliens, one finds a steady DECLINE or stagnation in real wages. That is NOT a sign of a labor shortage. Yes, that's a sign of labor surpluses! We've had 20 years of such surpluses, which have devastated wage growth among the unskilled.

Of course, if we were to implement an attrition strategy and limit further low skilled immigration, then we would experience labor shortages, and rising prices (and wages!). But that's how the market works. Supply and demand fluctuate. It's nothing to be frightened of, especially when America's lower class has been left out of the gains in the last 20 years, in part due to flooding the market with cheaper and cheaper competition. The Richard Posners and Gary Beckers would see their real income drop (ever so slightly), but the Americans in occupations like construction, food service, and maintenance would see their wages rise. Why should America import poverty, burden our institutions, squeeze the wages of our poor and strain our social fabric so that rich judges and economists can have cheap nannies and landscaping? It's an absolutely absurd policy.

What labor America "needs" in today's economy is skilled labor. Computer programmers, doctors, engineers, accountants, math and science teachers, scientists, nurses, and businessmen. But you won't see many politicians saying we need to import 2-3 million a year of these sorts of workers, because that just hits a little too close to home.

This article has more insight into the problem and makes more sense than Posner:

http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=12683

Immigration Reversals
By Myron Magnet
Published 2/5/2008 12:06:54 AM
This article appeared in the December 2007/January 2008 issue of The American Spectator.

I'm embarrassed it took me so long to grasp the phoniness of the charge that it's "anti-immigration" to oppose current U.S. immigration policy and the even worse "comprehensive reform" bill, which thankfully failed. I can only plead blind piety. After all, I live in the great immigrant metropolis, lit by the Statue of Liberty's torch, under which all my grandparents sailed a century ago to reach a land that amply fulfilled its promise to them. I feared that my misgivings about today's immigrant flood were but a short step from the nativist know-nothingism that dismissed my forebears and their fellow newcomers as defective both mentally and culturally, sure to debase American society with their ignorance, poverty, and crudity. Isn't the lesson of my grandparents' generation simply this: that American freedom and opportunity have a special magic, an alchemy for transforming tired, poor, huddled masses into free American citizens whose energy and grateful patriotism, and whose progeny, greatly strengthened the nation? However unpromising today's largely uneducated and unskilled immigrants may appear, do they really look any worse than their predecessors?

Such was the consensus among the writers at City Journal, the conservative magazine I edited from 1994 through 2006. But some years ago, when I sent a writer out to see how the magic Americanizing machine was working, he came back dismayed. After several weeks in a heavily Hispanic Manhattan neighborhood, talking to Catholic priests and their immigrant flocks, he concluded that the alchemy of assimilation was fizzling out. The priests saw their duty as signing up immigrants for every possible subsidy, especially the child-only welfare benefit available to American-born kids of immigrant mothers, a munificent sum to a newcomer from a peasant village. The clerics also were pressing local schools to teach the newly arrived kids in Spanish, so they wouldn't "lose their cultural heritage."

Oh dear, my writer thought: Now we have a system that subverts rather than promotes economic enterprise and cultural assimilation, the twin engines of Americanization. That was a story he didn't want to write.

To this unsettling report Heather Mac Donald piled on disturbing anecdotes from her frequent visits to southern California, stories about Mexican gangs and Latino family breakdown. Then Victor Davis Hanson poured out a vivid tale that sharpened these impressions. He grew up in a half-Mexican town in California's San Joaquin Valley, he told me, where he still lived and worked the family farm. With Mexican-American friends going back to his school days, when he was one of five Anglos in a class of 40, and a web of Mexican relatives by marriage, he'd chosen a career teaching the classics to mostly Mexican students, because (among other reasons) he likes Mexicans. But things had changed. In his childhood, Mexicans assimilated. Now -- with multiculturalism stoked up to boiling by armies of Latino advocates and by schoolteachers skeptical of the worth of the American culture that has produced all the advantages that Mexicans have flocked here to enjoy -- they don't. And as the population of Hanson's little town neared 90 percent Mexican, deeper problems emerged. He chased away three Mexican housebreakers at gunpoint at 3 a.m., he said; another time, outgunned, he had to let a carload of Mexicans get away with 100 pounds of oranges from his grove.

I ASKED VICTOR TO TURN THESE reflections into an article, the first of what became a series of City Journal re-examinations of the immigration question by Hanson, Heather Mac Donald, and Steven Malanga, now revised and just published as a book, The Immigration Solution (Ivan R. Dee). It takes a very different position from where we started out.

The issue, we quickly realized, is a lot more specific than we had thought. Though advocates have tried to obfuscate it, the debate isn't about whether immigration in general is good for this nation of immigrants, a truism that's hard to fault. The argument isn't about Indians or Chinese or Poles but about Central Americans, primarily Mexicans, who, because we have lost control of our southern border, have entered the country illegally. The advocates' real point is that these specific 11 or 12 million illegal Central American immigrants, most of them uneducated and unskilled, are a boon to our economy and society, because of their powerful work ethic and willingness to do "jobs Americans won't do," and because of their strong family values. We need them, the advocates contend, and as a practical matter we can't round them up and deport them even if we wanted to, so we'd better face reality with an amnesty program that will integrate them and a guest worker program to bring in still more of them.

Our writers found that none of these claims holds water. Steven Malanga made short work of the claim that this army of the unskilled enriches the nation, hard as many of them certainly work. To begin with, the U.S. economy is hardly crying out for such workers. They are in such oversupply that unemployment among the native-born unskilled is double the overall unemployment rate, and the labor glut has pushed down their wages by about 8 percent, no trivial matter for millions of native-born high-school dropouts, many of them minorities, including Hispanics. Such cheap labor benefits a few industries, such as home repair and the hotel and restaurant business, and it provides prosperous Americans with low-cost babysitters and gardeners. It's a mixed blessing to agriculture, one of the biggest employers of unskilled immigrants, since it has retarded mechanization, without which American growers soon won't be able to compete with foreign suppliers with even cheaper labor forces.

But weren't my grandparents' generation of immigrants also unskilled? In fact, the National Research Council reports, they were slightly more skilled than the native population, and the rapidly urbanizing U.S. economy of that time desperately needed all the tailors, stonecutters, retail clerks, and so on, arriving by the shipload. Unlike today's knowledge-based economy, it also needed plenty of unskilled labor to build its new cities and work its unmechanized and still inefficient farms. In addition, Malanga argues, those earlier immigrants brought with them a rich store of social capital: strong families, self-reliance, entrepreneurialism, a belief in education for their children, optimism about the future and belief in their new land rather than fatalism and cynicism. That's why their children were just as likely to end up lawyers, engineers, or accountants as the children of native-born Americans. By contrast, the American-born children of Mexican immigrants, two and a half times likelier to drop out of high school than the average American-born kid, earn less than the national average as adults.

If the benefit to the U.S. economy of such immigrants is modest, the cost they impose is hefty. Each low-skill immigrant household, whether legal or illegal, consumes some $20,000 per year more in government-funded services -- including education, school lunches, health care, prison guards, and welfare -- than it contributes in taxes, estimates the Heritage Foundation's Robert Rector. U.S.-born children of Mexican immigrants are twice as likely to be on welfare as the American average, and -- disturbingly -- their children are even more likely to be welfare-dependent. The lack of such programs a century ago meant that only those came here who thought they could take advantage of American freedom and opportunity by their own efforts, the key to the old immigration's success. Today, of course, such benefits attract the un-entrepreneurial and un-self-reliant to these shores, along with the hardworking. That's why Milton Friedman impatiently exclaimed: "It's just obvious that you can't have free immigration and a welfare state."

IF MEXICAN AND OTHER CENTRAL AMERICAN immigrants are a net loss for the U.S. economy, their net benefit to American society is also unimpressive. Just as the nation seems about to solve, or at least stabilize, its native underclass problem, Hispanics are creating a new underclass, even more unassimilated than the old one because of its self-identification as Mexican, not American. As Heather Mac Donald shows in her thickly reported chapters of The Immigration Solution, based not only on the data but also on interviews with gang-bangers, jail inmates, single mothers, cops, teachers, social-service providers, and others from neighborhoods ranging from the Los Angeles barrio to New York's outer boroughs, the prevalence of crime and illegitimacy among Mexican and other Central American immigrants and their children is as troublingly high as the rate of school-dropout and welfare dependency. It appears that these immigrants are forming ethnic enclaves in which social pathology flourishes and gets passed down from one generation to the next.

The crime statistics are stark. Nationally, the Hispanic felony arrest rate approaches triple that of non-Hispanic whites, and 30 percent of federal prisoners in 2000 were foreign-born. In California, home to 40 percent of America's immigrant population, Hispanics, who in 1970 were 12 percent of the state's population and 16 percent of its new prison admits, grew to 30 percent of its population in 1998 and 42 percent of its new prisoners. In Los Angeles, almost all of the more than 1,200 outstanding murder warrants were for illegal aliens. In a heavily Hispanic Manhattan neighborhood, cops estimate that 70 percent of the drug dealers and other criminals are illegal aliens. If, as the widely accepted "broken windows" theory of policing has it, such low-level crimes of disorder as subway fare-beating or public urination encourage more serious crime, since the criminally inclined conclude that no one cares about lawbreaking, then surely our nation's non-enforcement of its immigration laws, Mac Donald concludes, especially in the big cities that have adapted "sanctuary" policies for illegal aliens, is the biggest crime breeder of them all.

But such encouragement aside, Hispanic crime is high because Mexican and other Central American immigrants have brought with them a gang-ridden culture. Even in the high schools, gangs flourish, with names like SOK (Still Out Killing) and HTO (Hispanics Taking Over) in South Central Los Angeles. One Salvadoran kid told Mac Donald that most of his fellow eighth graders were already "locked up or dead"; he himself had done time for "GTA" -- grand theft auto. The gang bangers take violence for granted. "We're amazed at the openness of the shootings," a suburban New York homicide detective told Mac Donald. "When we do cases with Hispanic gangs, we often get full statements of admission, almost like they don't see what's the big deal." And as Hispanics fan out across the country, they bring gang crime in their wake. California's Ventura County, once crime-free, has had to get an injunction against one gang responsible for a murder spree; Virginia police view with alarm the spread of gang violence from suburban Washington down toward Charlottesville and the Shenandoah Valley.

Social scientists on the right and the left now agree, after decades of argument, that children of unwed mothers do less well on average than kids from two-parent families in every department of life, from education to employment to marriage, and single parenthood, unsurprisingly, is a key marker of underclass status. So it's troubling that, for all the talk of Latino family values, illegitimacy is epidemic among Hispanic immigrants and their grown-up daughters. Hispanic women are having babies at twice the rate of the U.S. average; half those new mothers aren't married; and that extremely high illegitimacy rate is skyrocketing. Like the old underclass, Mac Donald reports, many Hispanics see out-of-wedlock childbearing as normal, a matter for celebration not embarrassment. Like the old underclass too, a significant number of those out-of-wedlock children are receiving welfare benefits, and California is already caring for a second generation of Hispanic foster care children and group home residents.

MEXICAN IMMIGRATION may offer few benefits to the U.S., but it is an immense boon to Mexico, providing a safety valve for that country's unreformed political culture and failed economy, which has seen per capita GDP decline from 37 percent of the United States' in the early 1980s to 25 percent of it now. To workers accustomed to $8 a week in Mexico, $8 an hour in the California fields or Arkansas chicken processing plants looks like a fortune (though it's the low wages of these immigrants that account for much of the apparent uptick in U.S. income inequality). Those low wages, however, give newcomers enough to send money to their families in Mexico, in a stream of remittances that are Mexico's second largest source of hard currency and the lifeblood of entire villages.

It's no wonder that Mexican officials, along with Mexico's consuls in the U.S., vigorously promote the northward flight of their nationals, even providing an instruction manual, in comic-book form, on how to sneak across the border and not get caught later. But when high Mexican officials self-righteously and undiplomatically assert that any U.S. effort to stem Mexican immigration would be a human-rights violation, American officials might quietly encourage them to get their own house in order and foster economic growth, so their citizens don't have to abandon ship.

Advocates are right that the United States needs a new immigration policy, though one along very different lines from what they propose. We need an open and welcoming policy, shaped solely by the interests of our own nation, not by pressure from our neighbors or by passive acquiescence in the illegal status quo. No one, except for scare-mongering amnesty advocates, is suggesting the massive roundup and deportation of the millions of illegal immigrants already here. Instead, The Immigration Solution suggests we start by enforcing the laws already on the books, policing our borders vigorously, and stiffly fining employers who hire illegals. If judges object that the machinery for identifying illegals -- the federal government's system for verifying Social Security numbers -- is flawed, Washington should fix it at once. Without an opportunity to work, illegal immigrants would return home, just as 60 percent of immigrants from the first great migration went home when the Depression dried up jobs here.

Then we should craft an immigration policy that is generous in the number of people we admit, but that chooses newcomers not because they are a citizen's elderly parents or adult child or brother, however needy or unskilled, as at present, or because they successfully snuck into the country some years ago, like the 3 million illegal Mexicans amnestied in 1986, but because they have skills that the U.S. economy needs, including the ability to speak English. Immigrants most certainly do enrich our country, and not just those who are electrical engineers or medical researchers but also those who can fix an engine or run an X-ray machine or manage a small business. Other advanced nations that are immigration magnets, as Steven Malanga recounts in The Immigration Solution, have devised such selective policies with great success. Since we can only admit a fraction of the millions who would like to come and participate in the prosperity and freedom that Americans have built by their own efforts and with the benefit of their uniquely American culture and political system, let's choose our immigrants by asking not what this country can do for them, but what they can do for this country.

Haris,

Are you so naive as to think that those illegal aliens who've committed crimes will report to our authorities, knowing full well that they would be certain to be deported? I cannot for the life of me understand why some proponents believe this, much less advocate it and actually think that we'll deport the criminal element and make our society safer.

Publius

No, I don't believe that for a second. But no criminals ever voluntarily report. Finding them will require police action, illegal alien or not. There is NO policy that will cause criminals of any nationality to out themselves unless it involves amnesty for such crime, and I cannot advocate that kind of policy. If we can get the vast majority of illegal aliens [those who haven't committed crimes] to report, the problem of illegal immigrants becomes much smaller and much more manageable. Even 2 million people trying to hide is easier to deal with than 12 million people trying to hide.
I don't know how one could read my proposal to think that I'd actually believe we could get anyone to volunteer for deportation.

The Myron Magnet article is one-sided. The following one paints the other side of the picture, and also puts the issues is historical perspective. The truth probably lies somewhere in between.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/03/opinion/03davis.html

The Founding Immigrants By KENNETH C. DAVIS, July 3, 2007

A PROMINENT American once said, about immigrants, “Few of their children in the country learn English... The signs in our streets have inscriptions in both languages ... Unless the stream of their importation could be turned they will soon so outnumber us that all the advantages we have will not be able to preserve our language, and even our government will become precarious.”

This sentiment did not emerge from the rancorous debate over the immigration bill defeated last week in the Senate. It was not the lament of some guest of Lou Dobbs or a Republican candidate intent on wooing bedrock conservative votes. Guess again.

Voicing this grievance was Benjamin Franklin. And the language so vexing to him was the German spoken by new arrivals to Pennsylvania in the 1750s, a wave of immigrants whom Franklin viewed as the “most stupid of their nation.”

About the same time, a Lutheran minister named Henry Muhlenberg, himself a recent arrival from Germany, worried that “the whole country is being flooded with ordinary, extraordinary and unprecedented wickedness and crimes. ... Oh, what a fearful thing it is to have so many thousands of unruly and brazen sinners come into this free air and unfenced country.”

These German masses yearning to breathe free were not the only targets of colonial fear and loathing. Echoing the opinions of colonial editors and legislators, Ben Franklin was also troubled by the British practice of dumping its felons on America. With typical Franklin wit, he proposed sending rattlesnakes to Britain in return. (This did not, however, preclude numerous colonists from purchasing these convicts as indentured servants.)

And still earlier in Pennsylvania, the Scotch-Irish had bred discontent, as their penchant for squatting on choice real estate ran headlong against the colony’s founders, the Penn family, and their genteel notions about who should own what.

Often, the disdain for the foreign was inflamed by religion. Boston’s Puritans hanged several Friends after a Bay Colony ban on Quakerism. In Virginia, the Anglicans arrested Baptists.

But the greatest scorn was generally reserved for Catholics — usually meaning Irish, French, Spanish and Italians. Generations of white American Protestants resented newly arriving “Papists,” and even in colonial Maryland, a supposed haven for them, Roman Catholics were nonetheless forbidden to vote and hold public office.

Once independent, the new nation began to carve its views on immigrants into law. In considering New York’s Constitution, for instance, John Jay — later to become the first chief justice of the Supreme Court — suggested erecting “a wall of brass around the country for the exclusion of Catholics.”

By 1790, with the United States Constitution firmly in place, the first federal citizenship law restricted naturalization to “free white persons” who had been in the country for two years. That requirement was later pushed back to five years and, in 1798, to 14 years.

Then, as now, politics was key. Federalists feared that too many immigrants were joining the opposition. Under the 1798 Alien Act — with the threat of war in the air over French attacks on American shipping — President John Adams had license to deport anyone he considered “dangerous.” Although his secretary of state favored mass deportations, Adams never actually put anybody on a boat.

Back then, the French warranted the most suspicion, but there were other worrisome “aliens.” A wave of “wild Irish” refugees was thought to harbor dangerous radicals. Harsh “anti-coolie” laws later singled out the Chinese. And, of course, the millions of “involuntary” immigrants from Africa and their offspring were regarded merely as persons “held to service.”

Scratch the surface of the current immigration debate and beneath the posturing lies a dirty secret. Anti-immigrant sentiment is older than America itself. Born before the nation, this abiding fear of the “huddled masses” emerged in the early republic and gathered steam into the 19th and 20th centuries, when nativist political parties, exclusionary laws and the Ku Klux Klan swept the land.

As we celebrate another Fourth of July, this picture of American intolerance clashes sharply with tidy schoolbook images of the great melting pot. Why has the land of “all men are created equal” forged countless ghettoes and intricate networks of social exclusion? Why the signs reading “No Irish Need Apply”? And why has each new generation of immigrants had to face down a rich glossary of now unmentionable epithets? Disdain for what is foreign is, sad to say, as American as apple pie, slavery and lynching.

That fence along the Mexican border now being contemplated by Congress is just the latest vestige of a venerable tradition, at least as old as John Jay’s “wall of brass.” “Don’t fence me in” might be America’s unofficial anthem of unfettered freedom, but too often the subtext is, “Fence everyone else out.”